Homo sacer

How did our ancestors survived through the challenges during Prehistory? What did hominids used environment to survive teaches us about? During Prehistory time, the way Homo erectus and Homo sapiens survived is similar and different but teaches us about how both used the environment to survive. Survival were necessary to our ancestors because survival is to remain alive. Survival has changed the level of the weapons that Hominids used. It also changed clothes that Hominids wear. Survival…

centuries we firmly believed in the idea of all creatures were quadrupedal and we had never seen any exception. It was by accident that we discovered a group of species that featured bipedalism named Homo sapiens. This discovery refuted our long-held belief and successfully aroused us interests. The Homo sapiens were in fact similar to us in many aspects of body traits. Therefore, the key to the mystery would most likely lie in those distinctions…

In the past hundreds years, the British colonized over 100 countries including South Africa. Did this leave any positive impact on the colonized country? The colonization of South Africa began long time ago in the sixteenth century. With around one hundred and seventy years of colonization, the British changed South Africa so much that it brought a bad impact to the South African people ("British Takes Control of the Cape”). These negative impacts could cost the South African people’s social…

The earliest convincing evidence of fire use for cooking appears at the 780,000-400,000 year old late Homo erectus site at Zhoukoudian near Beijing, China and the 400,000 year old Homo heidelbergensis or early archaic human site of Terra Amata near Nice on the French Mediterranean coast. In both cases the evidence is primarily in the form of food refuse bones that were apparently charred during…

words, the torture of people believed to have information about the enemy. Here, I examine the reduction of a human being who lived a bios life and became a detainee whose life changed suddenly to zoe and therefore became homo sacer. The life of an individual who is homo sacer is that of zoe or bare life, that life which is common to all animals. Giorgio Agamben states that “it indicates, rather, a life that may be killed by anyone-an object of a violence that exceeds the sphere both of law…

Immigrants are being hurt because of the border and the mindsets it enforces. I chose this topic because of what I talked about during debate. This year’s policy debate topic was to discuss a plan to decrease the United States federal government’s surveillance. My partner and I chose to talk about what was happening on the U.S.-Mexico border. Our interest was primarily sparked when we heard of Esequiel Hernández Jr. and his story of being killed unjustly by a marine. The U.S.-Mexico border and…

because of its emphasis on the destructive dynamics between state and society. In order to understand the complex relationship between these two entities, it is essential to consider ‘La Zona’ as in a constant state of exception and Miguel as a homo sacer. A state of exception “implies the suspension of the law in order to safeguard precisely the application of said law” (Lehnen, 2012, p.172). ‘La Zona’ is separated from the rest of the city through security systems, which highlights the fact…

Agamben and Arendt have similar convictions regarding human rights and the necessity of the law to properly protect the freedoms and rights of individuals. In particular, Arendt addresses the problems that Eichmann should be held responsible for during the trial, whereas, Agamben considers camp culture and the political structure of the camp in terms of the law. Within the jurisdiction of the Eichmann trial, the importance of human rights in the system of the nation-state plays a large role in…

Agamben starts with two distinctions : zoe versus bios and oikos versus polis. Zoe refers to the form of life common to all living things, whereas bios refers to a form of life specific to an individual or groups. Agamben's second distinction runs in parallel: oikos is concerned with managing a household and household economics, whereas the polis is concerned with developing the good life. Agamben tells us that, starting with Aristotle and the Greeks, the Western polis was founded by relegating…

There is a deep history of exclusionary state policies and laws in regards to immigrants in general, which profoundly inform the sentiment towards asylum seekers today. The United States for example had the Chinese Exclusion Act from 1875 to 1882, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which limited the total number of immigrants per year (Rose-Redwood, The United States: Historical and Contemporary Migration, 2016). These two examples show the racialized and restrictive immigration policies of the…